In the field of oil or gas operations, various types of treatment fluids are often used to treat a wellbore or a portion of a subterranean formation with the aim to produce oil or gas from a reservoir. Resource recovery also spans the field of geothermal operations, including enhanced geothermal systems where rock fracturing and water injection treatments are carried out. In these operations, treatment fluids are often introduced into a wellbore, during drilling, stimulation, completion, servicing, workover, or any other stages. The treatment fluids are typically, but not necessarily, aqueous-based. An example of an aqueous-based treatment fluid is a fracturing fluid, for instance, a fracturing fluid that may be used in a fracture treatment performed on a wellbore or surrounding subterranean formation to enhance or restore the productivity of the wellbore.
There is a great demand of aqueous-based fluids in variety of wellbore or subterranean formation treatments. For example, fracturing a subterranean formation typically requires hundreds of thousands of gallons of fracturing fluids. Moreover, multiple fracturing treatments are often desirable to treat more than one zone in the subterranean formation. Thus, maximizing hydraulic conductivity through fracturing a subterranean formation may require thousands to even millions of gallons of aqueous-based fluids.
With the rising demand for potable water (e.g., drinking water) and freshwater, and with the rising costs of obtaining potable water and freshwater, it would be desirable to use any water source, sometimes lower quality water, in wellbore and subterranean formation. However, for such water to be suitable for use in a typical wellbore treatment, materials that would be detrimental to the chemistry involved in the wellbore treatments need to be reduced or eliminated.
There is also increasing public concern for the environment due to large quantities of lower-quality water produced from wellbore and subterranean formation. Handling and disposal of such water is an issue, as these water sources may contain many deleterious materials (sometimes referred to as water contaminants in waste water treatment) and hence are not typically surface dischargeable. Therefore, it would also be desirable to recover or reclaim the lower-quality water for further usage, such as in a wellbore or subterranean formation treatment, or at the minimum, recover the lower quality water before it is re-injected back into the subterranean formation.
Therefore, there is a continuing need in the art for methods to reduce or eliminate the deleterious substances that can be found in a recovered or flow-back aqueous-based fluid so it can be used or injected into a wellbore or subterranean formation. This invention answers that need.